Closet Picks

6 Jan 2025

Walter Salles’s Closet Picks

The director of I’m Still Here shares why Andrei Rublev and Stranger Than Paradise consistently renew his faith in cinema, talks about the unique mix of documentary and fiction in Memories of Underdevelopment, and praises how Garrett Bradley’s Time shows love and memory as forms of resistance.

Walter Salles: everything they reached for, and whose taste is nearest

choices
6
every one a single film
single films
6
chosen on their own
box sets
0
none this visit
films reached
6
no set to open

Criterion's own upload · on criterion.com

This visit as a strip, a cell for each choice: paler the older the film, indigo for a box set, which is one cell however many films it holds. The order is the order Criterion's own page lists them in, which is probably but not provably the order they came off the shelf.

single film, with its spine number box set

How far across film history it reaches

Where this haul sits in film history single films 1961 to 2020
a single film, at its year the collection, by decade

The axis is the same 1920 to 2030 on every visit page, so a haul that stayed inside one decade looks like one. A box set is drawn across the years of the films inside it, which is a range of release dates and not a claim about the set. Nothing here is in the order the choices were made: displayed position moves film year by a fifth of one percent of its variance, which is not a slope worth drawing.

How long this haul is

Its 6films run 11.7 hours. The median visit runs 19.2 hours, over the 375 whose every runtime is on record.

That is 117.3 minutes of film for each of its 6 choices, counting a box set as the one choice it was. Across the 375 visits with a complete total, the median is 136.4 minutes.

How unusual this haul was

Its 6 choices had been taken by 6.17 visits each on average, counting a box set as one thing. Every one of them has been taken by somebody else too. The least-picked was Time, taken by 4 visits in total.

This visit reached the work of Garrett Bradley, through Time and Jim Jarmusch, through Stranger Than Paradise, who have been in this closet too. Not one of those reaches is returned.

On Vimeo · On criterion.com